Her early childhood was spent in Bloomington, Indiana, and Oxford, England, but in her teen years the family moved to the North Rosedale Park neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan.
Thompson returned to the Detroit area when she and her husband (historian Jonathan Daniel Wells), accepted faculty positions at the University of Michigan.
[3] Thompson was a Soros justice fellow,[4] In 2015 she co-founded the Carceral State Project and Documenting Criminalization and Confinement research initiative at the University or Michigan.
[citation needed] She served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel to study causes and consequences of incarceration in the U.S.[1] Thompson's books include: Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Rebellion of 1971 and its Legacy (Pantheon Books, August 2016); Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (2001, new edition 2017); and the edited collection, Speaking Out: Protest and Activism in the 1960s and 1970s.
The book sheds new light on the riot, the state's violent response, and the decades-long implications of Attica for those involved as well as America's criminal justice system.
Thompson's research for the book included interviews with former Attica prisoners, hostages, families of victims, lawyers, judges, law enforcement, and state officials, as well as significant amount of material never before released to the public.
Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City is a regularly cited account of the history of Detroit during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s.